


Five Hits

by fannishliss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-21
Updated: 2012-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 15:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>  Doris (from Mystery Spot) logs in more hours at the archery range.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Hits

**Author's Note:**

> Part of [my Women of Supernatural project](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/31847.html), and also, for [](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/profile)[**poisontaster**](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/), who wanted more stories about [Health at Every Size](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/525861.html).    I'm also indebted to [this page about Korean archery](http://www.atarn.org/korean/IA_kr_1.htm). 

**title: Five Hits**  
author: [](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/profile)[**fannishliss**](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/)  
length: 660 words  
rating: G  
pairing: none  
  
summary:  Doris (from Mystery Spot) logs in more hours at the archery range.  
  
author's notes: Part of [my Women of Supernatural project](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/31847.html), and also, for [](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/profile)[**poisontaster**](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/), who wanted more stories about [Health at Every Size](http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/525861.html).    I'm also indebted to [this page about Korean archery](http://www.atarn.org/korean/IA_kr_1.htm).   
  
===

  
Doris bowed to the target.  

Her bow cover was tied around her waist, and five good arrows were tucked in on the side.

She closed her eyes and breathed out.  The sun was strong, the wind was light.  It was a good day for shooting.

She pulled back her bow and held it.   She always thought of Dan the first several shots of the day, how he'd given her the archery club membership and lessons with a traditional Korean archery teacher as a Valentine's present.  A red card with a chubby cupid shooting an arrow through a heart and a note inside it -- "you'll always be my valentine, love, Dan."  He'd been so proud the first time she hit the target that he took her and her teacher out to a fancy Korean restaurant, where they sat on the floor and talked and laughed and nibbled through the numberless traditional side dishes.

Three weeks later he'd died on the golf course, massive coronary, gone in a silenced heartbeat.  His ashes remained in a box in her living room.  Mark and Scott had come home, seen that she wasn't falling to pieces, and gone back again to Portland and Houston.  Dan had left her comfortable -- house paid off, retirement funds in place -- but she wasn't ready for retirement alone.

She just wanted a job where she'd meet people.  The waitressing job was perfect.  She liked the diner -- it was clean and the food there was good -- she got to know the regulars and the folks passing through.

She liked to speculate about the people, pretending she was Sherlock Holmes, deducing from their details.  Every so often the people she studied stuck in her head.  Like those two brothers who'd come through about six months after Dan died.  Worried about something, but pretending to be fine.  Sometimes she seemed to hear the bigger one in her head scoffing about her time at the archery range, which was just weird, because how would he even know about her archery? He didn't know the first thing about her: not her love of French lit, not her trips with Dan to Asia and Africa, not her house or her sons or the perfect horn bow that Dan had given her, that she was learning to master in his honor and for her own heart's sake.  

So, sometimes, she heard that boy in her head, sarcastic about her archery.  Sometimes she caught the rude glances from the local boys who came to the archery club with fancy compound bows, their targets shaped like white-tail deer.  She paid them no mind.  

When she closed her eyes, her breath smoothed out.

When she pulled the bow, she could feel her own power, the strength in her arms and legs, the strength in her heart that hadn't stopped beating the day Dan's did.

When she let fly, the arrow was a prayer.  Sometimes it was a prayer for harmony, sometimes it was praise for the beauty of the day -- and sometimes it was a warning shot, sent out to something she couldn't really name, a warning that she had always been more than she seemed.

Her arrow flew straight and true to the target.  Another, another, another, and another.

The day she became a master, her sons were away, her husband gone, her old master moved on to another town.

There was no one at the range to understand or observe the formality of the moment, no one to give her a new name besides herself.  

But Doris closed her eyes and bowed again to the target, and that evening she took herself out to the Korean restaurant, and savored the barley tea and the cold buckwheat noodles, and in her mind's eye she stood with a team of Korean women, all world-class athletes, and they congratulated her on the five hits, and she was an amazon or a goddess in white, her bow across her back, her arrows straight and true.   
  



End file.
